Introduction -- State-nonstate alliances in civil war: a new balance-of-interests theory -- Saving the house of Islam: Pakistan's 'volunteers' in the war of 1971 -- 'Guns plus interest': renegades and villagers in India's Kashmir war -- Tribal 'awakenings' in Pakistan and India -- All the state's proxies in Turkey and Russia -- Conclusion
In: Asia policy: a peer-reviewed journal devoted to bridging the gap between academic research and policymaking on issues related to the Asia-Pacific, Band 16, Heft 1, S. 193-196
AbstractThis article explores public knowledge creation by examining how theNew York Timesproduced Pakistan news between 1954 and 1971, the formative period of United States of America (USA)–Pakistan relations. These years encapsulate not only the heyday of cooperation between the two governments, but also the American public's first major introduction to the South Asian country by the increasingly intrepid news media. A leader in shaping that introduction was theNew York Times. While most studies of the American media focus on measuring the effect of news exposure and content on public opinion, this article focuses on the theoretically underexplored aspect of news production: foreign news gathering. With a lens on South Asia, it shows that foreign news gathering involves the straddling of on-the-ground political and logistical constraints that generate an atmosphere of high uncertainty. By exploring the limitations on news gathering faced by America's leading newspaper's foreign correspondents in Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, this article identifies an important historical source of the ambiguity characterizing USA–Pakistan relations. The findings are based on recently released archival material that offers rare insight into the news-production process.
In: Political science quarterly: a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study and analysis of government, politics and international affairs ; PSQ, Band 126, Heft 4, S. 669-680
In: Political science quarterly: a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study and analysis of government, politics and international affairs ; PSQ, Band 133, Heft 4, S. 695-727
What is the role of civil society in geopolitical conflict? The crisis in Ukraine has, once again, raised questions over security in the post‐communist world. This article examines the puzzling variation in the antimissile defense shield protests in the Czech Republic and Poland (2007‐09) to elucidate the conditions under which civil society emerges as a significant actor in international politics. Activists in the Czech Republic staged seven times as many antishield protests as their Polish counterparts despite the two countries' similar levels of popular opposition to the project. The variation in the responses of the Polish and Czech activists resulted from the different material and legacy‐driven ideological constraints faced by the civil society organizations. The findings suggest that the scholarship on contentious civic activism should take organization‐level opportunities and constraints seriously when analyzing the impact of civil society on political processes.Related Articles
What is the relationship between governance and security? What impact, if any, does state presence have on civilians' perceptions of security in militarized conflict zones? The existing literature suggests that government control over a restive region means order and security for the local population. We propose a 'mental mapping' framework for the relationship between state presence and security perceptions in militarized ethnic peripheries, drawing on prior research in urban planning about how attitudes are shaped by living environments. We use a survey experiment to measure the effect of the physical presence of government institutions on civilians' sense of how safe they imagine their city to be, demonstrating a mental mapping mechanism between the physical presence of the state and perceptions of safety. We show that residents who encounter images of state institutions on a map of Srinagar – the largest city and summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, India – are more likely to perceive their city as less secure than those who encounter a map without images or a placebo map. This experimental evidence implies that government security presence is not always perceived as security by the civilian population.